


opposite of amnesia

by transstevebucky



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, F/F, M/M, Pining, Self-Hatred, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-24
Updated: 2018-03-24
Packaged: 2019-04-07 04:25:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,283
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14072859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/transstevebucky/pseuds/transstevebucky
Summary: Rick is forged from iron, and Shane is built of rust. Every hand that touches him comes away stained, and the selfish part of him still aches for more.





	opposite of amnesia

**Author's Note:**

  * For [soft_bucky](https://archiveofourown.org/users/soft_bucky/gifts).



> i started getting #emo about just how devoted shane was to rick so this happened and now i'm uhhh dying so that's fun! god bless
> 
> canon character death is not shane, btw.
> 
> title comes from fall out boy's 'centuries'

Here's the goddamn bullshit of a thing: Shane loves Rick.   
  
Loves him in a firefight, pinned down by criminals. Loves him in the hazy glow of the night as they patrol the streets. Loves him with a smile on his face as he runs around the back yard with Carl's feet thumping against his chest. Loves him now more than ever before.   
  
And maybe one time it was a brotherly love; familial, platonic, the kind of love that comes without a burning ache in the bottom of your gut that feels like fire and ice at the same time.   
  
Maybe once upon a time he used to look at Rick and think:  _ that's my best friend. _   
  
Now, though, as Rick smiles at him past Lori's hair in his eyes, Carl cuddled to his side, the stink of rot in the air, all he can think is: _ that's the love of my life. _ __  
_  
_ __ And he's gonna fucking ruin me.

 

+++

 

The first time Shane slept with Lori, the back of his mouth tasted like bloody bile and panic.   
  
Because he'd realised, when he'd kissed her, when she'd kissed back, he wasn't thinking about her always-silky hair, or her smile in the sunlight. He was searching for the taste of Rick's mouth behind her tongue, in her very pores, tracing the shadows of Rick's touch like an obsession.    
  
She and Rick had been having problems long before Rick got shot. Long before Shane woke up screaming with the tacky feeling of sweat on his palms that's too close to the feel of Rick's blood.   
  
God knows when they'd kissed last.   
  
Only Shane had seen her give Rick a kiss on the mouth earlier that day. Seen the way her eyes went soft, for a moment, and instead of a burning love for her, all he could think was: I want to be that for him.   
  
I'd let myself crumble to ashes to feed the earth from which he eats.    
  
So Shane kissed the traces of Rick's coma from Lori's mouth, and couldn't stop thinking about short-shorn curls and strong hands.

 

+++

 

The night Rick comes back (from the dead from a coma from everything, not for Shane and of course it isn't, but for his wife, his son), Shane sits on watch for four hours alone. He stares at the side of the tent Rick sleeps on. Knows that in that small, cramped space, Rick's touching his wife with adoring hands.   
  
If he thinks hard enough, he can feel the firm heat of those strong fingers over his own skin; backslaps after a case solved, being gently pushed back into wakefulness after a long night of drinking and talking shit. If he thinks hard enough about something else, it almost doesn't feel like a brand, almost doesn't feel like if he slid his shirt from his shoulders the imprint of Rick's hand wouldn't be there in a red scar.   
  
He hears the noises Rick makes as he comes. He hears the way Lori sounds as she does the same.    
  
It's not Lori's noises he struggles with, after, not those panting breaths he has issue with pushing out of his head.   
  
It's the way Rick sounds like honeyed gold that has him arching into his hand hours later, just before daybreak.   
  
When Rick greets him the morning after, the ache in Shane's gut doesn't ease.   
  
A hand settles on his shoulder. He knows what the Colosseum felt like with all that blood in its walls.

+++

 

Rick kisses him the first night they get to the farm. Carl's laying somewhere in the house with stitches holding his body together, Lori standing vigil at his bedside, and Rick Grimes' mouth is on his.   
  
Shane wants to say he isn't a selfish man. That he pushed Rick back because this isn't what Rick wants, right now; that what Rick wants is his son alive, and to not think for a moment.   
  
He'd love to say he was kind enough to not move into the kiss the second Rick touches him. That his skin doesn't ache like it's suddenly gone too tight around his muscles, his fat, his bones. Like it's three sizes too small and all because Rick's got a hand flat against the small of his back.   
  
But, despite everything, he's not a liar. He's a coward, a bad man, a cheat. He swears too loud, too much, looks with lust at someone he will never have.   
  
So he won't say he doesn't. Because the truth of it is his throat aches like it's parched, and now Rick's tongue is on his it feels like an oasis in a desert. Like a transfusion of everything about Rick that made him say: oh. It's you.   
  
The way Rick kisses is like holy water and sin entwined, so good his gut trembles with it. His back hits the wall, Rick's fingers hitting the wood of the stable.   
  
"Please," Shane begs, because he's cruel, because he's desperate, because from the moment he met Rick he's been gone, "please."   
  
"Okay," Rick tells him, and pulls off, "alright."   
  
It wasn't what he'd asked. It feels like lead where Rick's fingers had pressed in.   
  
He watches him walk away; the tight line of his shoulders, the faux-relaxation of it all, the way he brushes his fingers through his hair.   
  
Shane touches his mouth, tears at the stable wall, and says, voice cracked, "please."  
  


+++  
  


There's blood in Shane's mouth. Matching blood on Rick's knuckles.   
  
There's flint and cold despair in Rick's gaze, and it hurts worse than if Rick had gutted him with a serrated knife.   
  
"I'm sorry," Shane says, because he is, he is, he hurts so much for everything he's done, for all he will do, "I'm so fucking sorry, Rick."   
  
"You kissed my wife," Rick says, and his voice is steel. It is almost as cold as Shane's gut. "You kissed my wife, Shane. I was dead, I understand, but you kissed her yesterday. I was alive. I'm alive now. And still you're looking at her-. Like, like she's something you want."   
  
"She isn't," Shane says, and it feels like his blood trickling down his front, but it isn't, not really. It's his soul. "She's not what I want. She never has been. She's not-. I've never looked at her and thought of anything except."   
  
"Except what?"   
  
He wonders if it's cruel to ask Rick to kill him. To lower himself to his knees, arms behind him, blood on his chin, and say "execute me."   
  
If it's better to live in sin or to die in it.   
  
"Except you. Every time I ever looked at her, the entire time you were gone, I was thinking about you. Every time."   
  
"You slept with her."   
  
"I know," his voice turns begging, "I know, Rick, and I wasn't thinking about her."   
  
Rick's hand clenches. Once, twice, three times. Shane readies himself for a fist to his gut.   
  
"You bastard," he says, and suddenly Rick's tongue is sliding up his throat and swallowing his blood like a flesh-eater, like a creature of the night, and Shane loves him, "we could have had this."   
  
Yes, Shane thinks, and knows that there's no good way this will fall apart, because Rick Grimes is a saint through and through, and Shane tore himself out of hell with torn knuckles and a point to prove. We will.    
  
He kisses back.

 

+++

 

They fight. They bleed.    
  
Mouth-to-mouth becomes something other than resuscitation, and Shane learns what it feels like being on the other end of a panicked gaze, hands flying over a chest.   
  
He stares up at Rick's eyes, brushes his hair behind his ear. His entire body is going limp, blank, vision going dark, and all he can see, hear, smell, is Rick and his godawful cologne and his eyes, his fucking eyes.   
  
"I love you," and it comes garbled, his blood splattering down his front, "always. Forever. Love you 'til the stars dry out."   
  
"Don't," Rick's begging, and there's hands holding his wound closed, but Shane's eyes are still too slow to blink, "Shane, don't do this. We got so much time to make up for."   
  
"Take care'a yourself for me," Shane says, and his pinky finger links around one of Rick's curls like a promise, "someone needs to keep your dumb ass safe."   
  
There's something peaceful about dying.   
  
There's something angry about waking up.  
  


+++  
  


When he comes to, there's bright light across his unopened eyes and hands touching at his shoulders.   
  
They're moving. God knows where, God knows how, but they're moving, and the sound of wheels on concrete grinds through his head like a chainsaw.   
  
"Fuck," he hisses, and the hand at his shoulder tightens, "Jesus fuck."   
  
He opens his eyes one at a time. The light damn near blinds him. The eyes watching him nearly do the same.   
  
"You're here," Rick's saying, voice cracked, and there's dried blood (red-brown, all over his shirt, like the way he looked after-), "you're alive, fuck, Shane, fuck, thought I lost you, can't-."   
  
Shane reaches up with a hand that doesn't quite feel real, and cups his jaw. His voice is raw. "Mine," it says into the stale air of the van, "mine."   
  
Rick smiles at him, broken and weak. "Yours. Always."

 

+++

 

They find the prison. They conquer it. They settle into life.   
  
And then Lori dies. And a part of Rick does, too, and Shane loses his mind all over again, watching the love of his life kill walkers like it's all he knows to do. Like that's his mission, now, his very purpose.   
  
"Stop," he begs, and there's the wail of a baby far away that could be there and could be yet another hallucination scratching at the edges of consciousness, "Rick, please. We need you. I need you."   
  
"She's dead." Rick's voice is gravel. Blood on asphalt. A bullet to the chest and panic. "She's dead, my wife's dead, and I still goddamn want you."   
  
Shane's heart breaks. As he watches, a walker's skull explodes into bits of grey matter and gore.   
  
He thinks, mildly, that he understands the feeling, and turns away.

 

+++

 

He wonders if it would be easier if he'd died on that field, Rick's knife bloody with gore. If it would have been simpler to have been slain at the love of his life's hand than to live through that and see every ounce of regret in Rick's posture.   
  
He stares at his gun for a long, long time on his nights, but the shot never rings out. He's a coward about this one thing, forever and always, and he fucking hates himself for it.   
  
"It'd be easier," he tells his grimy reflection one day, when he's alone in the prison showers and the night's settled low, "if you were dead. Better. Let Rick live and grieve instead of tearing open a new wound looking at you."   
  
Because that's the truth of it. Rick might love him, might touch him, but Rick is forged from iron and Shane is built of rust; every hand that lingers comes away stained, because Shane will never be anything except for risen dead, even alive. Even breathing and talking and walking and screaming into the ether.   
  
Rick left his wife for him, and the worst part of it is that she understood. She looked at them and said it was best, and she was in pain, in turmoil, in agony; pregnant with their child, god knows which, because now it's both and that hurts. And still Rick took Shane's hand and let himself get marred with his dirt.   
  
Rick looks at him sometimes like he's worth looking at.   
  
Shane likes remembering that, instead of the violent way Rick stabbed him months back. Instead of the way he'd begged for it.

 

+++

 

"You asked me," Rick says one night, when he's bathed in the light of the moon and looks even more ethereal than in the hot Georgia sun, "to kill you. Why?"   
  
Because it would be better. Because it would be kinder. Because I am cruel and made of flame and I'm terrified of watching you get burnt. Because I deserve everything you have to give me, but all you give me is warmth.   
  
"Rather it be you than a dead one," he tells Rick, and Rick clenches his jaw like he doesn't believe him.   
  
That's okay. Shane doesn't believe himself either.

+++

That night is a blur.

He remembers unsteady hands and rot and groaning and the sound of wood creaking. Remembers his voice begging for an end that would never come.

Remembers his fist tight on Rick’s wrist, like a vice, a cuff; why does Shane chain everything he loves until it loses its light. 

Remembers saying “stab me, kill me, live your fucking life and be rid of me.”

Remembers the look in Rick’s eyes when Shane’s hand had jerked the blade towards him and it had sunk in. When the blood had spurted between their joined hands and Rick had cried out in horror, in fear.

Shane’s mouth opened in relief, a scream into the open void of the stars miles above them. 

Remembers the declaration of love that near broke him, right as he was bleeding out against dry, dry grass and staring into Rick’s blue eyes.

“Why’d you make me do this,” he’d asked, or at least Shane thinks he did, “why did you make me become this.”

Shane thinks about who he was before Rick. Thinks about a boy with grazed knees who became a man with grazed knuckles and a scarred over heart.

“Because you made me better, and it sickened me.”

No lie tastes more bitter than one told through a mouth that’s mourning.

  
  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> [tumblr](http://gaydaryl.tumblr.com/)
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> i love comments/kudos/feedback/screaming over shit!!!


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